Fox and Talen's Blurty

Further Musings From A Wandering Son
This started as an attempt at a bio for the Atheist Nexus site I just joined. It grew out of control, so I'm posting it here instead.

I'm Australian, born in Victoria, and I spent the first four years of my life moving from location to location, sometimes as far north as Ipswich, before settling in Engadine for ten years. The reason for all the motion was following my father's ministry. We settled into a small Independent Baptist church-school in which my mother became a schoolteacher, my father a regular preacher for the church. I went through the Accelerated Christian Education system for ten years, was bullied constantly, was subjected to abuse from the principle both physical and emotional, and was routinely treated as subhuman - because my father was an outspoken Calvanist. My mother was similarly abused by her church regulars and my sister was subjected to massive amounts of self-esteem demolition by the same principal.

When I was... twelve, the pastor admitted to the congregation that he had been embezzling money from the church to prop up his lifestyle and to finance multiple business ventures that had failed. And not just from the church's coffers - no, he'd been using his position of influence to manipulate the (good, christian) wives of more successful churchgoers into mortgaging their houses to give him more money. He announced this as he announced that his creditors were getting too close and he was going to leave.

The principal of the school, who had been enjoying his position to torment my family on the basis of his disagreement with my father (who he could not attack directly), was heavily emotionally dependent on this pastor, and the revelation that he was leaving shook him - he said he would quit the school at the end of the year, and quit he did, taking with him his wife, the school's senior English teacher. I say that, but let me be as clear as I can: This is a school of thirty to forty students, ranging from kindergarten through to year twelve, being taught by a mostly self-teaching school system. The loss of the principal led to his replacement by one of the women in the church who had teaching experience, and, eventually, her replacement with an unqualified man whose primary qualification was as a choir leader. Why? Because he was a man.

Fortunately, I suppose, my father had a falling-out with the deacons of the church under this structure. The three remaining deacons disagreed with him, some major event - honestly, I don't remember the actual sermon - leading to a falling-out and them screwing my mother out of her long-service leave (ten years of service without a paid holiday). Rather than oust my sister from her education, mum and dad stuck it out for the last of a year, and, once my sister had graduated (she's four years my senior), fled south to Wollongong, where my sister would be going to university.

There was a huge cultural disconnect for me, leaving this church. Now, I had never liked the environment in which I was raised. It was literally torturous - I would go to school, get beaten up by kids half my age and half my size, run and hide, then be dragged before the principal and punished along with my assailants because of my involvement in 'fighting.' If not for students significantly younger than myself, it would be the school's collection of malcontents, behavioural cases that had been kicked out of public schools for various reasons. This includes stuff like starting fires or complete illiteracy. These kids would turn up at school, and before the school day had even started, be making their days by throwing rocks and bricks, chasing me down - and I was not a fast runner - and beating me. This was pretty much my daily pattern - my only rest from the problem was when these kids would be bored or entertained by something else, like the faddish fascinations with various games that the whole 30-strong school would embrace.

I'm not saying I was perfect - I really wasn't. I had a fast mouth and a short temper, so when things were what I felt was unfair, I would lash out, certainly in the early days of my life. I was especially incensed that, my slow speed being renowned, kids would routinely settle decisions about games with a short footrace.

Some of this stuff really persists with me - being beaten about the legs led to minor problems which even now give me twinges in my bones and remember unpleasant days. Fog rising off wood went from being a fascinating thing to an unpleasantly close experience, having my head smacked into the wood. They didn't leave a lot of bruises, either. I had a senior pick me up when I was eleven, and drop me a full foot onto his knee, crotch-first, for no reason that I can remember. I was bleeding from my groin for days. Rather than approach the principal to report to him what had happened, I crawled to my mother, the teacher of the primary school half of the school, and begged her for help - I was allowed to self-administer antiseptic creme to myself in the bathroom, and did so with much shame and embarassment... only to have the principal drag me out once I was done, and rail me up before the whole class for defying the power structure of the school (and defying god himself), but for lying about the nature of my injury. I stood before a class of my peers who were smirking and sniggering at me, claiming I was 'faking' my limp and lying about my time in the bathroom. It was humiliating and painful and oh-so-so typical. One of the more humiliating experiences was when an eight year old girl who happened to have a very big big brother led a trio of other girls her own age to pull me on the ground and rub my face in the dirt. I was twelve and literally twice the size of the girl. Why did I subject myself to this kind of abuse? Surely I could get away?

Well, the fences in your own mind are the highest. Early on, my father drilled into me that it was never okay to lose my temper; never okay to hit back; never okay to defend myself. No, that was God's right - and even though the Bible he vaunted featured so many stories of the good guy kicking ass, it was never my place to protect myself. That was God's place. Not my father's place - no, my father and mother were there to administer punishment and care, but to never address the problems.

It was clear I had no love for this environment. There really was nothing to like. It taught me clearly that all the television shows I could see about school days are the best days of your life as being written by selfish idiots who didn't realise there was more to the world than their own experiences, and their own nostalgia. Suffering from wretched self-loathing inspired by my family (don't get me started on masturbation), from physical and emotional abuse from school, I had no options. I couldn't physically leave the school - indeed, 'sending you to a public school' was a threat my mother used to try and encourage me to behave better in the school I was in.

The people you go to school with are not your friends. They do not have things in common with you. The people you make friends with are your friends. The people you want to see, want to deal with, the people with whom you forge connections, those are your friends. But to simply go to school with someone is no sign of a friendship. It has nothing to do with friendship, and the willingness of people to fool themselves into that leads to horrible abuses. Adults and parents considered those students who were physically assaulting me on a daily basis my friends, and were completely willing to ignore the violence.

And we moved. We moved away from this school system that had left me intellectually malnourished and physically scored and to a new place and a new school and a new church and what I found from top to bottom is that the only things I liked about the world in which my parents put me were when they didn't involve religion. I got along with my new peers as they swore and cussed and talked about punk music (and yes, this new school was christian, too - we had a teen pregnancy, mind you, brought on by ignorance of sex education). I tried in these years to grasp onto faith, to come to terms with the hipocrisy and the lying... it was really embarassing in hindsight, but at the age of 14, I was really much closer to a mental age of 5 or 6 with regards to critical thinking or understanding. I had a fundamental grasp of things like fairness, and a desire to make things work out evenly for everyone, but I hadn't the tools or the practice to truly appreciate what that meant. All my understanding of these processes were gained through apologetics - through sitting in in my fathers' various lessons to churchgoers, talking to them about how the mormons were a cult, the moonies were a cult, the catholics were a cult, and so on. I was not so cemented in the faith that I failed to consider the faith that I was myself espousing.

I was raised with a fear of death, a fear of hell, a fear of sex, a fear of fellow men, a fear of breaking the rules, a fear of real demons that walked the earth, a fear of satan himself offering me pleasure, a fear of culture that made me happy, a fear of masturbation and a fear of even other people within the Christian faith. I was scared and lonely and wretched and my entire upbringing was designed to create this attitude, and created by a mother and a father who to this day I have no doubt whatsoever, love me. They did this horrible thing to me and defined my childhood with nightmares because they honestly and sincerely believed it to be the best thing to do.

I started heading home from church early. I started walking home on my own rather than spend my time associating with people with whom I didn't want to talk. I stopped taking notes and started drawing pictures. I gave up. Some part of me on some fundamental level surrendered. The contradictions, the conflations, the differences between the types of faith... they were getting to be too much for me. So one night, I had the closest thing I ever did to a serious talk about religion with my father - I told him that church was about a real, personal relationship with Jesus, that the nourishment of the Holy Spirit was part of the experience, and that I had never felt it. I had never felt part of God's chosen and never felt that I belonged. So I wanted to take some time away from the church, to step away, so as to not provide a stumbling block for others within the faith.

And he accepted that. It was... sad and intense for me to realise that my dad felt this represented a fundamental failing on his part. And there was further tension with him, over employment, over my direction. See, the culture in which I'd been raised had been so tightly controlled that in all my years of schooling, a fundamental question had never been posed to me, it had never been asked of me: What do you want to do after school?

I'm serious. It had never been asked. I had never had the 'when I grow up I wanna be' discussion with anyone, and I honestly have no idea why. I had no ambitions, no drive. I went into every year of school figuring that school was the unending path that spiralled ahead of me, and if it was going to change that someone would tell me. Even now, I find it hard to take first steps towards things because that grounding is so strong. I have a hard time putting myself forward, starting sentences with I want. It's something down to my bones now, and I really think it's made me a failure as a person.

A terrible education, a stunted social circle, physical and emotional abuse, interpersonal helplessness and a lack of direction. The fruits of a religious environment, the result of being told that someone else is in charge and to never think for myself.

People have often accused me of being an angry young man. You know what? I think with a life like I've had, I have that right.

Current Mood: depressed